WWWFBJrD? Not Invade Iraq.

The latest issue of Commentary has a solemn black-bordered memorial to William F. Buckley Jr. as a "master" and "cherished friend" (and the magazine’s editor, John Podhoretz, offered this vaporous and largely meaningless eulogy). Buckley has also been fondly eulogized by Bill Kristol, promoter of the Iraq war.

Buckley published three syndicated columns about Iraq, all of which
were reprinted in National Review. The first argued that it is doubtful
that an effort "hugely greater in scale and more refined in
conception" would produce the desired result. [not sure what that means!] When no weapons of
mass destruction were found, Buckley speculated that this rationale for
the invasion, now discredited, would not matter if all ended well. But
as the 2004 presidential election approached, he compared the evident
quagmire to the French defeat by a brutal insurgency in Algeria.
[my emphasis]

In these pieces, Buckley diverged sharply from the generally
optimistic view of Iraq taken by National Review. Kristol must have read
these columns at the time but had perhaps forgotten them when he wrote
his column about Buckley–or else dismissed them since the Weekly
Standard still believes that the Iraq effort has been a success.

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3 Responses

Oarwell

March 28, 2008, 12:28 pm

Or moral aphasia.

Buckley is leery of the very golem he helped assemble, standing athwart history and yelling "Stop!" He purged the "conservative movement" of all small-r republicans, embraced Big Government as a necessary evil to combat hegemonic communism, and back WITHOUT RESERVATION, until his dotage (Catholic guilt?) the Military-Industrial complex.

Kristol, lying scumbag that he is, ignored WFB's trepidations because they do not fit with his propaganda model.

Kristol, as was Bill Buckley, is merely a propagandist for the Warfare State. If Buckley had been younger, and not the owner of NR, when he apostasized, he would have been denounced by the Poddys and Kristols and Hannitys and all the rest of the claque.

Jim Haygood

March 28, 2008, 1:00 pm

.

Or fugue.

"But as the 2004 presidential election approached, [Buckley] compared the evident quagmire to the French defeat by a brutal insurgency in Algeria."

A later bit of Algerian history which would be edifying for the U.S. and Israel: the nullified National Assembly election of 1991. After the Islamist FIS party won a landslide, a military coup cancelled the election, setting off a civil war which cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Nullifying Hamas's victory in the January 2006 Palestinian election was a repetition of the same error, which is already having the same results. The dunces who can't learn from history have been detained after school to repeat it.

LAX

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